


rivers there to weep

by darlingofdots



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Gen, Grief, Harrow the Ninth Spoilers (Locked Tomb Trilogy), The People's Tomb Fic Jam: First, cam jam for the cam stans, give the girl her necro back
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-08
Updated: 2020-10-08
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:56:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26897797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darlingofdots/pseuds/darlingofdots
Summary: Camilla gets her necro back.
Comments: 9
Kudos: 55





	rivers there to weep

**Author's Note:**

> I'm ignoring all the implications of the HtN epilogue for this because I don't understand them and I wanted to write this exact scenario. Don't ask me how we got here, just trust me.

Palamedes Sextus took his first breath in the Library. For the rest of his life, the taste of its particular blend of recyc air, dry and a little dusty and enriched with stimulants to keep the scholars alert, would follow him wherever he went. He joked in letters to Lady Septimus that if he ever came to visit her in the gardens of the Seventh House, his lungs would be so overwhelmed with the sudden change in air that they would give out in protest; she replied that it would certainly be a nice change, to not be the only one fighting to breathe. When Palamedes and his cavalier arrived at Canaan House, the damp sea air took them both aback for a moment and they had stood in the golden light of Dominicus while they adjusted, focusing on the movement of air in and out, the faint sting of salt on their lips.

He took his last breath in the sickroom of a women he had never known, but he knew as he tasted the heavy, sweetly miasma of death that this was the end. He imagined the air travelling through his bronchial tubes into the bronchioles and the six hundred million alveoli, expanding his ribcage, imagined the passing of oxygen into his blood and to his heart, beating quite calmly in his chest.

Palamedes exhaled.

##

‘This proposition is absurd,’ Harrowhark said. ‘Even if it were feasible, you know very well that I am not a flesh magician.’

‘That’s alright,’ Camilla Hect said evenly. ‘I’m not either.’

‘I can expand what we have into a full construct, I can even use regenerating bone, but to attempt anything beyond that would be foolhardy at the very least!’

‘I invoke the rock that remains ever unrolled. You swore —’

‘To aid you if I can, yes, and I would, but I cannot do what you ask of me! I am not capable of it! I can think of only one person who would be, and she is dead.’

Camilla said: ‘I am not a necromancer. I am cavalier primary of the House of the Sixth, and I am a Scholar of the Great Library.’ She was sure Theo had taken over for her when she had been declared dead, and she had only taken the Scholarship examinations out of personal vanity when she was fifteen, although her position as cavalier was the higher rank, so only the first of these statements was true, strictly speaking. For now. ‘I know how the body works, Nonagesimus, and I know… him.’ Only the briefest of pauses; she would not falter now. She placed both her hands on the ground where she knelt, felt the grass and the soil and the solidity of the planet beneath them. She met Harrowhark’s eyes across the expanse of sterile tarp she had laid out between them. ‘If you cannot do this for me, I will find someone who can.’

There was no-one else, and they both knew that.

Harrowhark closed her eyes and took a deep breath. ‘I cannot promise that it will work.’

 _I’m losing him_ , Camilla did not say. _I’m losing him, and I don’t know how else to get him back_. Instinct made her want to reach for the leather pouch around her neck; she squashed it. There was nothing there now but a phantom weight; the skeletal hand she had carried and guarded like a holy relict lay between them, starkly pale against the black tarp. Camilla counted her heartbeats, three times six. ‘It will work.’

##

In the River, breathing was a vestigial process: since every sensation was an illusion, including the sensation of having a physical body inhabiting a physical space, the act of breathing did not actually perform any kind of function beyond the psychological relief of following familiar patterns, continuing a cycle that he had maintained for every moment of his life. In the absence of external stimuli, there was not much else to do.

Camilla had tried to teach him to meditate once, a billion years ago. It hadn’t worked; Palamedes had complained (whined, he heard Camilla’s voice say) that as Master Warden, it would be irresponsible to clear his mind of all concerns and worries because he had a duty to fulfil that he could not afford to ignore. No matter how hard he tried, he could never quite manage to calm the turbid ocean of unbidden thoughts that came tumbling through his brain at breakneck speeds and disappeared again unless he captured and pinned them like moths, and Camilla had given up making him try.

It turned out that it was quite easy not to think when you were dead. He spent — well, time meant nothing here (eight months, eight _months_ ), but he spent however long it may be sitting with his back against one wall of his self-imposed holding cell, obscuring half a chapter of his frankly atrocious foray into historical fiction, eyes closed, just breathing. Breathing brought no relief, no flood of oxygen, but if he concentrated he could run through the entire process in his mind, from inhale to exhale, and some days (minutes? weeks?) that was all that kept him in a state of something resembling sanity.

Somewhere out in the universe, Camilla was alive. He could feel her there, sometimes, through the strings of spider silk that connected him to whatever there was left of his bones. It was never much; a moment of warmth or a sudden movement or maybe what could be, if he gave in to sentimentality, the pressure of her fingers. He tried to hold on to that, too.

##

Camilla did not watch. As part of his preparations, the Warden had written out a full page of theorems as instructions, which Camilla had spent her first night with the Blood of Eden memorising when she should have been sleeping, and then she had torn the flimsy into seven hundred scraps and methodically swallowed every single one. She had scratched it out into the dirt for Harrowhark, who had stared at it for ten full minutes before nodding and settling down into that curved spine sitting position on the ground next to Camilla. She had taken Camilla’s hand, squeezing her fingers too tight. Camilla had screwed her eyes shut, bitten her lip until she could taste blood, and concentrated.

She had known the Master Warden since they were both children. They had been attached at the hip for well over half their lives and she had been his cavalier long before either of them had passed their exams. Palamedes had held her hair back that time she caught the stomach bug raging through Swordsman’s Spire and she had not stopped vomiting for two days; she had wrapped blankets around his shoulders late at night when she could not entice him to bed; they had shared a bed for more nights than she could ever remember sleeping by herself. From the time he was eight, the two of them had spent all of their time not taken up by training or chore rosters studying the human body to maybe, one day, save a woman neither of them had ever met. What she was about to do was impossible, but Camilla did not believe in that kind of talk. She just did what she had to do.

##

Palamedes Sextus took his first breath on an uninhabited planetoid millions of light years away from home. It _hurt_ , the unfamiliar atmosphere burning in his newly regenerated lungs — he was lying on something hard, and staring at an endless red sky, and then he was sitting up with his hands at his throat, gasping, fighting for air.

Something moved in front of him and obscured his vision; hands on his face, and then Camilla’s forehead pressed to his, and her voice: ‘Easy. Breathe.’

When he could, he wrapped his hands around her wrists (his own hands, part of him noted, there was that scar on his right thumb and the freckle at the base of his left palm). ‘I am so glad to see you.’

He felt her exhale, steadily, for a count of six. ‘Welcome back, Warden.’ And then, ‘ _Palamedes,_ ’ and she threw herself at him like a woman starved. She buried her face in his shoulders and cried in great, heaving sobs and the best he could do was hold her and wait, marvelling at the sensation of another body beside his own, warm and alive and real.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from [this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJvRTZmz2nY). Huge shoutout to neornithes on the discord who suggested Camilla using Pal's name when she gets him back, I shamelessly stole that to incorporate into my own thing.  
> I'm on tumblr @scesisonomaton


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